Social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Yelp, CitySearch, LinkedIn, and the like have brought about means with which an entity can easily and at anytime communicate with a broad audience. The draw to communicating through social media is the ability for one entity to communicate with any of the other millions of individual entities and business entities that have registered accounts with a particular social media site.
In some social media sites, communication occurs by way of a message originator entering and posting a message to a site that is associated with the account that the message originator has registered at a particular social media site. By accessing the message originator site at the particular social media site, “friends” or entities that have a preexisting relationship with the message originator can view the posted messages. Some social media sites allow the postings to be made public such that any entity that has an account at the particular social media site can access the site of the message originator to view the posted messages of the message originator. This however is a poor utilization of the messaging capabilities of social media, because viewers that are interested in the messages of the message originator have to actively seek out the messages that are posted by the message originator. In other words, a viewer first logs into its own account at the particular social media site and then the viewer navigates to the site of the message originator before being able to view the posted messages. A further issue with this form of communication is that entities that are the targets or subjects of various posted messages have no idea of what is said about them by others. Further still, entities that are the targets or subjects of various messages may be unable to view the messages when the messages are restricted to viewing by “friends” or entities that have a preexisting relationship with the message originator. Lastly, when one is interested in learning what others have said about a particular entity, there is no central place where messages that reference the particular entity can be found as the messages are instead posted on the sites of the message originators and not on a site pertaining to the particular entity.
To overcome some of these obstacles, some social media sites provide communication that occurs by way of a message originator entering and blasting a message to a set of specified recipients. This is typically accomplished by use of email messages, chat, or instant messages. This method of communication also has various shortcomings and similarly fails to realize the full messaging potential of social media. Specifically, blasting messages to one's “friends” or entities for which a preexisting relationship already exists, is a poor conduit for sharing one's experiences with others that one does not have a preexisting relationship with. For example, blasting the message “I love Acme restaurant” to one's friends would cause that message to only be read by those friends. A random entity wanting to know what others think about Acme restaurant would be unable to see that message and therefore the experience would not be shared in social media. Similarly, the entity representing Acme restaurant would be unaware that such a positive message was posted and therefore would have a difficult time trying to ascertain how it is perceived by its peers, customers, etc.
When blasting messages to recipients, the message originator can make the effort to post the message to a site of the entity that is the subject of, target of, or referenced in the message. Continuing the example above, some social media sites allow the message originator to blast the message “I love Acme restaurant” to a site that is associated with an account that Acme restaurant has registered at the social media site used by the message originator. In this manner, anyone interested in learning about Acme restaurant can navigate to the account/site of Acme restaurant at the social media site and see messages that other entities have posted about Acme restaurant. To communicate in this manner, the message originator is required to manually specify Acme restaurant as a recipient for the message by entering the username, handle, or other identifier for the Acme restaurant social media account as the intended destination for the message. While this is accepted practice for most forms of online communication, this practice is inconvenient and inefficient especially when the message originator does not have a preexisting online relationship with one of the recipients. The message originator can still send messages to that recipient, however the message originator would have to search for an account of that recipient on the social media site before being able to blast a message to that recipient. This is a particular issue with review sites such as Yelp. To post a review about a business entity on Yelp, one has to (1) login to his/her Yelp account, (2) identify an account for that business entity on Yelp, (3) access the account of the business entity if it exists, and (4) post the message to the account of the business entity. The inconvenience of having to manually search for and identify a recipient when a message is to be directed to that recipient inhibits the use of social media as a truly convenient platform with which an entity can share its experiences with another entity when no prior relationship exists between the two on the social media site even though the two may have had a real world interaction.
A further obstacle to blasting a message to a particular recipient at a particular social media site is that the particular recipient must have an online presence at the particular social media site in order for the message to be blasted to that particular recipient. When the message originator has an account registered at a first social media site (e.g., Facebook) and the recipient has an account registered at a second social media set (e.g., Google+), the message originator cannot post a message to an account or site of the recipient because the recipient has no presence at the first social media site and because inter-social media site communication is typically not supported because of different messaging protocols, formats, interfaces, etc. It also may be the case that the target or subject of a message has no social media presence whatsoever (i.e., has not registered an account with any social media site). In such instances, one cannot post a message to the site or account of the target recipient and entities interested in learning about the experiences that others have had with the target recipient have no central place to view such messages.
In view of the foregoing, it should be apparent that current means of communicating through social media are poor conduits (1) for sharing experiences with others that one does not have preexisting relationship with and (2) for informing an entity that is a target or subject of a message about the experiences that one has had with that entity. Accordingly, it would be advantageous to simplify and improve the process with which a message originator can share its experiences about a specific entity that is the target or subject of the experience. To that end, there is a need to be able to automatically identify accounts of entities that are referenced in the body or contents of messages entered by a message originator and to automatically blast messages to those accounts. There is further a need to perform such automatic message blasting irrespective of whether the target entity has an account registered at any particular social media site.